China's Power Grab? The Truth About Belt and Road

The Bunker – News without the nonsense

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News, Government, Politics, Society & Culture

4.6 • 1K Ratings

🗓️ 5 May 2022

⏱️ 36 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

You may have heard of China’s ‘Belt and Road Initiative’, but what actually is it? And what are Beijing's underlying motivations? Jelena Sofronijevic speaks to Eric Olander, co-founder and managing editor of The China Africa Project, and Raffaello Pantucci, a co-author of Sinostan - China’s Inadvertent Empire, to uncover the truth about Chinese economic investment abroad. “The BRI, in many respects, is like a Rorschach test, where you can see anything you want into it.” - Eric Olander “If you had to boil it down to one central idea that defined the BRI, I'd have to say connectivity.” - Eric Olander “The BRI is China's way of expressing its foreign policy.” - Raffaello Pantucci “China's saying, let’s all just make money together. And underlying that, there’s an idea that has worked at home, that if we can make everyone rich and prosperous we can all get stability.” - Raffaello Pantucci “What bothers me a lot about the discourse surrounding Belt and Road, is that we take all the agency out of the host country.” - Raffaello Pantucci “China looks at Africa in far more political terms than economic terms.” - Eric Olander https://www.patreon.com/bunkercast Written and presented by Jelena Sofronijevic. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Lead Producer: Jacob Jarvis. Assistant Producer: Elina Ganatra. Audio production by Jade Bailey. THE BUNKER is a Podmasters Production Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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1:15.9	Touted as China's Marshall Plan, the BRI is a broad movement of global economic
1:20.3	investment to build new trade routes between China and the rest of the world,
1:24.0	creating its own interdependent markets in the process.
1:27.0	And it's big.
1:29.0	Back in 2017, President Xi-Shingping pledged over-Ping pledged over 124 billion to the BRI.
1:35.0	But for most of us, it does seem like an abstract economic development project,
1:38.8	something that's happening in Asia and with little impact for us at home. But where is China looking to expand its global
1:44.8	influence and why? Is it really encouraging development overseas or just greater exploitation
1:50.5	and economic dependency.
	...

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